Sandy's blame

Were those mean old racist, homophobic, greedy, war-mongering, misogynistic, Big Bird-bullying, science-denying Republicans the malevolent presence behind the destructive force of Sandy? Yes, indeed, say some — and not just those on the far reaches of the loony left. New York’s Daddy Warbucks mayor, Michael Bloomberg, endorsed Barack Obama, saying he at least recognizes the menace posed by global warming and stands ready to protect Gotham and the Jersey Shore from its depredations.

There were some sagacious wags who suggested that maybe the mayor should have worried a little less about super-sized sugary soft drinks and the fat content of fast foods and fretted a little more about disaster preparedness. But such misgivings didn’t impede Democratic talking points from suggesting GOP indifference as the blame for storms of Sandy’s destructiveness. The Obama media cheering section rallied behind the talking points. “It’s Global Warming, Stupid,” declared the cover of Businessweek.

This view is to science roughly what necromancy and astrology are to it. Even the United Nations’ climate alarmist IPCC says so. Global warming is, after all, a GLOBAL unifying phenomenon. Nasty storms are created by the clash of varying weather systems. As the IPCC recently put it: “It is likely that the global frequency of tropical cyclones will either decrease or remain essentially unchanged” as the climate warms.

Ken Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research say a warmer ocean may have added, oh, 10 percent if that to Sandy’s ferocity. But as far as global warming’s generating such storms, that’s unlikely, he says. He says such storms are more likely the result of “natural variation” in weather patterns, the “juxtaposition of weather systems.” “A lot of this is chance,” he adds. Robert Zubrin — hardly a flat-earth knuckle-dragger with his aerospace engineering background and PhD in nuclear engineering, says there is “no empirical or theoretical” ground for thinking climate change generates hellish storms.

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Not even Sandy’s intensity was any match for the two back-to-back hurricanes that hit in 1954-55, within weeks of each other. Here’s the number of hurricanes making landfall in America in the cooling period of 1950-1980, when greenhouse emissions (carbon dioxide) averaged 324 parts per million: 41. And here’s the number of hurricanes making landfall in the warming period 1980-2010, when greenhouse emissions averaged 362 parts per million: 18. The sea level rise in the cooling period 1940-1980 was the same as the rise since 1980.

But suppose contrary to all evidence that global warming IS generating nasty storms. Didn’t Barack Obama promise to stop global warming? Didn’t he declare that his ascension to the presidency marked the monment when the seas would cease rising and the planet would start healing? Oh, wait, let us guess: George Bush left the earth in far worse shape than Obama had anticipated. As Jon Lovitz’ “Tommy Flanagan” used to say on Saturday Night Live: “Yeah! That’s the ticket!”